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Originally Posted by PhilliesPhan
I'm a Temple student (if you can't tell by the neighborhood lol) who does the same thing and feels the exact same way. I now live on 19th and Berks, and I don't even like walking along 19th Street due to not feeling like I'm in the city. This kind of land use is indicative of how those in power felt about Philly in the 90s and early 2000s. They thought that land in certain areas of North and West Philly (take, for instance, the land surrounding the 46th and 40th Street stops) never be developed with the prevailing market forces of the time. That short-sightedness is why Poplar will remain underdeveloped for a while, and why we need to scrutinize every detail of a new PHA plan (if that development is indeed PHA housing). Fortunately, the Sharswood development embraces principles of Mew Urbanism.
Here is one thing I will never get about those decisions, however: why build suburban-style housing when there is a waiting list of people who need PHA housing? Also, why build these when rehabbing the sturdier brick rowhomes would have costed WAY less per square foot?
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there are a host of reasons. You are drastically oversimplifying several aspects of what happened. Also, the waiting list you speak of is for rental housing and/or vouchers- not the same as much of the for sale housing that was built in North Philly (and elsewhere) during 90s and 2000s. Rehabbing old homes is slow and expensive. any contractor will tell you it's faster and more efficient to build new than it is to retrofit- especially when you are trying to retrofit modern features into old structure. Saying it's "cheaper" as blanket statement is not accurate.